This week was the “Re-action Week” which all of the scholars have to showcase their projects to the public. Although this week was super busy and challenging, it was definitely the most rewarding days I have had in Mexico!

To give a brief summary of our project, we organized an “Art and Embroidery workshop” in the Impact Carnival this Saturday in collaboration with Angel Aviles, the artist and co-founder of Iinkikalente. Our project aims to promote iinkikalente to more people from Mexico City and even the international population through interactive art sessions and selling handmade embroidery bags made by indigenous women from Yucatan (where iinkikalente was based). The reason why we chose embroidery as the main activity of the workshop was that it is an activity that empowers the indigenous women in Yucatan by bringing them together and providing them with another way to earn a living. Moreover, as embroidery is an activity that is not too popular yet in CDMX but is suitable for all ages of participants, we would really hope to promote this art form and this unique community at the same time.

Regarding things that had gone well, I think our team made great success in the workshop with the support from Angel from iinkikalente and our volunteers. Not only were many people interested in our workshop, but participants were even actually exchanging their thoughts about arts and even the community throughout the embroidering process. They also showed interest in knowing more about the Yucatan community and the artworks or projects that Angel has been working on. What’s more, the volunteers even created an embroidery Whatsapp Group with Angel after the workshop as they really hope to continue doing and promoting this activity to their own community. Despite this one-day workshop may not be showing great effect on empowering the organization at first glance due to time restrictions, the small steps that this workshop has brought are actually creating a greater impact on the community than expected.

Throughout these 3 weeks from the brainstorming of workshop ideas, preparation, meeting volunteers, to the actual execution of the workshop, I think “flexibility” was the greatest leadership skill that I have taken away. To illustrate, we may have brainstormed many ideas for the workshop, but it turned out most of them could not be executed due to the financial budget and difficulty in searching for suitable instructors. Hence, we have to be flexible in adjusting the content of our workshop with the limited time and materials we have. While in terms of collaborating with the volunteers, we originally had 18 volunteers, but we ended up only having 4 of them able to work due to different reasons. As a result, we had to rearrange the job distribution and resize the workshop capacity so that everyone won’t get too overwhelmed with the workload. Despite the challenges we faced, we still managed to work out the project smoothly at last and we also received supportive feedback from the volunteers, artist and participants. Therefore, I am quite satisfied with the project result and definitely had a great time working with my team.

While the next step I would like to further investigate on is how to maintain the effect or extend the sustainability of our project in long term.